Chapter Twenty-Nine: Compiling the Future

Punk Rock was prophetic: it’s forbearers were voices in the wilderness, it’s leaders revelled in ‘the-axe-is-at-the-root-of–the-tree’ proclamations and it’s followers envisioned a kingdom of heaven wherein each believer wrought their own culture.

That’s why prophets struggle with acceptance; once their prophecy comes to pass they’re left to explain the fall-out.

How much of our debased culture can be blamed on the democratizing influence of punk's DIY philosophy? Warhol’s maxim that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes required his own slackening of artistic principles as well as his patronage of those standard bearers of punk: The Velvet Underground. How many limpid, tuneless indie rock bands could have been prevented if Moe Tucker had never been allowed to sing-speak her way through a couple of numbers?

And how about that glut of cheap compilations that clog up retail racks? That’s a punk problem. Before punk the compilation, soundtracks aside, was primarily an exercise in nostalgia, a history lesson. But punk and especially hardcore would turn those sepia snapshots of the good old days into blurry Polaroids of the near future. The Rodney on the Roq compilations envisioned LA punk’s long desert-march to the pop charts and Bruce Pavit and co.’s American Youth Report, besides being a near-perfect compilation, predicted the riotous growth of the American Underground.

MRML would now like to dig deeper onto the chicken entrails of the past. First up is It Came From the Pit, which (along with the Something to Believe In from California’s Better Youth Organization) laid bare Canada’s contribution to this Revelation. Besides the requisite hardcore acts, ICFTP featured the garage rock of the Enigmas, the, jazz-punk of NoMeansoNo, the proto-riot girl of the Ruggedy Anne’s and the inevitable crossover of S.C.U.M. So, like all those great comps it expanded the definition of punk by the power of juxtaposition, thereby helping to spread the word to all the nations of the earth. Sorry about all those monotonous budget-priced sampler CD’s though…

Download

Punk comps often came in series whether it was SST’s the Blasting Concept or the aforementioned Rodney on the Roq, even It Came From the Pit got a resurrection of sorts in the way-earlier mentioned It Came From Canada series of the late 80’s. (We'll go back there...)

Now The Sound of Hollywood (a six-parter) is a different animal. Mystic Records pretty much defined the term “generic hardcore” with its massive catalog of thin-sounding cramped vinyl releases. Volume Two, however, was a strange one. Dedicated to LA in ‘83 just as metal and jangle began to splinter the hardcore scene. Straight up hardcore like SVDB and Battalion of Saint is here but that nostalgia that inspired Tom Wolfe to call the 80’s the “Re Generation” is all over this record. There’s the mod sound of F-Beat, the metallic Würm and the all-acoustic Bad Religion. Yeah, you read that right. Following their disastrous plunge into the Paisley Underground, Bad Religion (or what was left of them) went all singer-songwriter. My first Bad Religion song was “Only Gonna Die” from American Youth Report. I loved the pseudo-erudite lyrics and that acoustic breakdown but spent years hunting for more when everything they did was out-of-print. These two ballads were the next thing I found. Disappointing? Partly, but I loved these songs – I still do and the production (such as it isn’t) served them better then the often cringe-inducing sounds of Into The Unknown. It also predicted Greg Graffin’s future plunge into Americana on his solo albums.


Download